Re: [OT] use http-equiv to refresh the page

[fliptop <fl...@peacecomputers.com>]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 at 22:52, Chris Shiflett opined:

[snip]
CS:The W3C's stance on refresh is the same for the header as well as the 
CS:meta tag: they did not originally intend for it to be used to specify a 
CS:*different* URL as a rudimentary method of redirection. They meant it to 
CS:be used to refresh the current resource only. However, this "rogue" 
CS:practice of redirection is quite common with both the header and the 
CS:meta tag and is very well supported by browsers. In fact, I am not aware 
CS:of any Web client that supports refresh but also limits the URL to the 
CS:current resource only.

i was bitten by this assumption recently.  case in point:

i needed to develop a way to display several images as a slideshow using
plain html files.  i would glob the images, and in each html file i
inserted a meta refresh that would load the next image in the series after
a 7 second delay.  since the html files were eventually going to be burned
to a cd, i had to point to each new file as such:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="7;file02.html">

because i cannot always assume to know the user's cd-rom drive
designation.  this worked fine in netscape and mozilla, but did not work
at all in internet explorer versions previous to 5.5.  in older versions
of ie, it simply refreshed the current page after the 7 second delay, no
matter what was put after the semicolon in the content attribute.  so i
had to include instructions for the users that if they used internet
explorer, they must upgrade to at least version 5.5 for the slideshow to
work.  of course, i had tested the app on ie 5.5, so i didn't discover
this myself until a user contact me and complained the slideshow wasn't
working.

and you'd be surprised how many old versions of ie are being used out 
there.